Harnessing the power of the RDA: grants and other instruments supporting grass-roots expertise, knowledge sharing and community building

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25 Feb 2022

Harnessing the power of the RDA: grants and other instruments supporting grass-roots expertise, knowledge sharing and community building

Submitted by Timea Biro


Meeting objectives: 

 

Discuss the best ways to support and fund grass-roots expertise, knowledge sharing and participation in the context of open science community actions. RDA is one example, but other initiatives might bring their own challenges, as do differing mechanisms and instruments used in various geographical regions and across various disciplines. 

 

The aim is to understand the benefits of these instruments, how they can be used as an effective light-weight approach to community involvement. The session will also explore any barriers, issues, constraints, and possible models for future community support activities.  

 

The session also aims to collect feedback on how to improve these instruments to reflect the bottom-up nature of community driven developments and ensure the careful balance of allowing bottom up developments versus top down management of call topics.

 

 

Meeting agenda: 

Collaborative session notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ipu9pacRnjP4oZMAo4OYccclrfw8L5UQUlqf...

 

> Present RDA and EOSC Future open calls as an effective instrument and mechanism to support community driven development examples in the context of a regional common research 

 

> Discuss similar approaches, previous, current and ongoing, and other funding mechanisms in other RDA regions supporting similar developments

 

> Open discussion and feedback on: 

  • topics of focus - existing and desirable
  • types of outputs expected / success stories 
  • timelines, 
  • disciplinary community coverage and representation, 
  • technical requirements 
  • new technical developments 
  • issues around financial support 
Type of Meeting: 
Working meeting
Short introduction describing any previous activities: 

 

RDA Europe 4 and EOSC Future have been running activities to manage small grants programmes for individuals over the course of a project. They have proved to be an effective way of developing community specific engagement strategies and leveraging connections to under-represented disciplines and other areas of data management. Experience has been gained in terms of managing the calls to fine-tune them to the current needs of the community and the outputs had a significant impact on contributing to RDA activities and in different context such as the European Open Science Cloud. 

These effort require a continuous dialogue with the community and consolidated ways to incorporate feedback. 

 

BoF chair serving as contact person: 
Meeting presenters: 
Najla Rettberg, Timea Biro
Avoid conflict with the following group (1): 
Driven by RDA Organisational Member: 
No
Applicable Pathways: 
Data Infrastructures and Environments - International
Other